Become the Princess Knight
As the lethal hunter Hornet, adventure through a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Captured and taken to this unfamiliar world, prepare to battle mighty foes and solve ancient mysteries as you ascend on a deadly pilgrimage to the kingdom’s peak.
Hollow Knig...
As the lethal hunter Hornet, adventure through a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Captured and taken to this unfamiliar world, prepare to battle mighty foes and solve ancient mysteries as you ascend on a deadly pilgrimage to the kingdom’s peak.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is the epic sequel to Hollow Knight, the award winning action-adventure. Journey to all-new lands, discover new powers, battle vast hordes of bugs and beasts and uncover secrets tied to your nature and your past.
Game Features
Discover the fallen insect kingdom of Pharloom! Explore mossy grottos, gilded cities and misted moors as you ascend to the shining citadel at the top of the world.
Engage in lethal acrobatic action! Wield a huge suite of deadly moves as you dance between foes in swift, beautiful combat.
Craft powerful tools! Master an ever-expanding arsenal of weapons, traps, and mechanisms to vanquish your enemies and explore new heights.
Solve shocking quests! Hunt down rare beasts and solve ancient mysteries to grant the wishes of the downtrodden and restore the kingdom’s hope.
Face over 200 ferocious foes! Beasts and hunters, monsters and knights. Defeat them all with bravery and skill!
Vanquish over 40 legendary bosses! Battle fabled heroes and fallen kings in epic combat to decide the kingdom's fate.
Challenge Steel Soul mode! Once you conquer the kingdom, test your skills in a new mode that presents a more formidable challenge.
Experience a stunning orchestral score! Hollow Knight’s award-winning composer, Christopher Larkin, brings melancholy melodies, symphonic strings and heart-thumping, soul strumming boss themes to the adventure.
Context: Played through almost all of Hollow Knight, got to the third-last boss of Pantheon 5. I haven't finished Act 1 of Silksong, and I'm pretty sure I don't care any longer to continue.
As a metroidvania, I expect that areas of the game will be unreachable until I have the relevant ability. Presumably, that area and those past it will then expect me to use that ability with increasing competence.
This game does that to some extent, but it also has times where it will let you get into an area where either the platforming or the combat is technically doable, but is extremely difficult without the relevant ability.
I completely disagree with this approach. I should not have to decide whether or not a challenge is achievable with practice. I don't want to give up early on something doable, and I don't want to spend 10s of hours on a challenge before I finally decide that maybe it's too difficult with my current abilities. Gate the challenge off until I am expected to overcome it reasonably.
Also, this game is much more likely to have battle challenges that involve gank fights, or bosses with adds. This by itself is not bad, but this game also loves for those adds to take several hits and thus it's extremely easy to get overwhelmed. Also, balancing these fights is likely impossible because if you have four enemies on screen that can be in any position in the room and doing several possible attacks, there is too much reliance on RNG on whether or not the fight is easy or difficult.
Lastly, the game has a resource that you can use to heal or do a special attack. It is very difficult to use the special attacks when you are likely going to have to heal. I've read people saying that you should use tools more...which is okay except for the fact that using tools does not appear to regenerate silk like hitting an enemy directly does. So using tools doesn't help the healing resource issue.
The game has a nice, consistent art style and vibe though!
Compared to the original Hollow Knight, this game just feels *worse* in a way I can't describe. There's a lot of great stuff in here—another amazing soundtrack, fantastic art direction, and some fun characters—but the core gameplay loop just feels off. Compared to the original game, Silksong feels like it *hates* you—the original Hollow Knight would attempt to run you over with a mid-sized sedan every now and then, while this game is just constantly running, and then backing, over you with a Cadillac Escalade.
It's just as good as expected but damn it's way too hard
OK after playing more I change my review game is infuriating and frustrating, who balanced that game should really admit he failed because the game is needlessly, stupidly hard for absolutely no reasons, I enjoyed Hollow Knight for many many hours I'm going to beat Silksong and if someone ask me if they should play it I would say no go play Ori and the will of Wisps, same kind of game but you will actually havea good time playing it unlike this nightmare
I finished this game about a week ago, so I’ve had time to digest it. Hollow Knight is one of if not my favorite game of all time. This is the third time I've rewritten this review-- I am very passionate about this title lol. I finished Acts I and II vanilla, Act III with mods. I've gotten the "true" ending in Hollow Knight. As for Silksong, it’s just too hardcore and not so much challenging as it is tedious.
First, more positively, I honestly appreciate the direction they went with this game. It’s not just more Hollow Knight, it takes on a life of its own by asserting itself as separate and distinct from its predecessor.
What I love:
-Hand drawn worlds and animations, of course
-Harder difficulty (although it spikes too much as mentioned below)
-Subtle and nuanced music
-Unique crests add much variety to combat and traversal
-Many enjoyable and uniquely designed boss fights
-The central story/dialogue is intriguing and written well
Dislikes (there's a lot):
-Extremely unfun runbacks which degrade nearly every boss fight experience. Some of them can be shortened with a super secret bench hidden behind wall #47 in room #352, but aintnobodygottimeforthat.
-Debuffs galore. Debuffs that prevent you from healing, specifically, because the lore apparently dictates which areas are an unfun slog to actually play. Side note: I’m waiting on an update that adds a 20% rosary tax on every transaction, ya know, to add to the “lore” /s. In fairness, you can get a crest to balance this debuff, but it’s literally the furthest point away from the starting area.
-Dozens of “gotcha” and “troll” hazards. God-forsaken fake benches which can only be found through sheer trial and error and rote memorization. No environmental cues, just cheap gimmicks which only exist, imo, to create viral clips on twitch or other social media.
-Many, many, many gauntlets, the longest of which is 24. waves. long. Several mandatory gauntlets precede boss fights. Many boss fights spawn extra enemies, because apparently difficulty in 2025 means fighting 7 enemies at once. Now, ironically, I actually love the coliseum of fools in the first game, but I did not enjoy most of the gauntlets in Silksong. Maybe because the coliseum is completely optional and rewards you generously. It’s also about 10x more varied than any of the gauntlets in Silksong.
-They added an entire bone currency just to, imo, balance one crest (architect). Consequently, earlier before you get this crest, this bone money only serves to frustrate lower skill players (read: not part of the top 0.01%) who need extra attempts on boss fights. This bone money is a total gimmick which throws the entire early-to-mid game off because of a single crest that lets you replenish tools using silk.
-A major gripe: The Reaper crest’s needle is a bit RNG. There’s a 50/50 chance of you swinging the needle above or below you. So you end up missing (mostly flying) enemies a lot because you think you’re swinging up and forward, but instead the needle decides to swing underneath and forward, evading the enemy. How fun!
-Very poorly designed fetch quests/town center job boards. For example, one of the side quests has you go collect 15 or so “bells.” These bells are random drops which only appear in 2 rooms in a specific zone. And they only respawn once you’ve sat on a bench. So, you’re just going through these same 2 rooms 10 or more times, hoping you get a random drop so you can beat one of the dozens of side quests required for Act III (yup, these are required). Plus, you only get these quests after you’ve already ran through a zone. So you’re going *back* to old zones to grind items.
-Many tools feel cheesy and gimmicky to me. It feels like Home Alone simulator, where I’m raining down pins & needles on enemies, then hiding in a corner hoping I don’t have to actually fight anyone.
-Enemies read your inputs before attacking. They select an attack, read where you are (or where you’re going), move to that location, and then attack. This is especially jarring with flying enemies (which make up like half of the total enemies), who can read your attack, dash out of the way and *off-screen*, then throw a projectile at you from out of sight (and many bosses = 2x damage). The clawline *helps* here, but it doesn’t reward as much *silk* as a regular attack, which is very much needed to heal during the marathon gauntlets. Later on, my awkward solution was to clawline > double jump > pogo, but that can be very risky depending on the enemy (collision damage on super fast and large flying enemies just-- is not fun to handle for most of the game).
Overall, it’s like they took my least favorite parts of the first game (runbacks, flying pests which throw projectiles, deep nest) and made those parts central to this game. It’s very claustrophobic, dimly lit, and just kinda feels like you’re stumbling through it all. In addition, fundamentally, the skill floor is just too high. “Oh well, why don’t you just go explore and come back to this hard boss later?” Because so much extra content is hidden behind endless waves of sidequests/gank/gauntlets/etc. that you can’t help but feel like you’re always underleveled no matter what. Even health masks feel useless to a degree, because merely colliding with a static enemy = 2x damage.
All that said, don’t get me wrong, there's incredible content in this game. I'd recommend trying it out, especially at 20 dollars. But I can't help but think that they took a large DLC for Hollow Knight and then padded it with uninspired, well, junk and gimmicks. Sure, some hardcore Fans might eat this stuff up, but for me-- it feels like a waste of time. Tantalizingly, I think it could be a 10/10 game with a couple of changes to make the story/ambiance/etc. more central and the difficulty more justified and enjoyable.
Finally, I wanted to add a few solutions to these problems in the form of mods I used in Act III.
1. Warding Bell Plus - Makes you temporarily invulnerable while healing, preventing the mechanic which drops your entire silk bar *and* damages you if you get hit by an enemy (because of i.e. contact damage by flying/teleporting enemies).
2. Custom Hit I-Frames (No Multi-Hit Anymore) - Increases invulnerability after taking damage by a few milliseconds, preventing instances where you get spam-hit by multiple enemies.
3. All Enemies Drop Rosary Beads (and Shards) - Makes the game feel more rewarding and less like a grind, especially early on.
4. Stakes of Marika - Rebirth. I wouldn't recommend this for the original game, but for this one the runbacks are so egregious that I strongly recommend it. I wish this mod only removed the most tedious runbacks, but it is what it is.
Bonus 1 [tools]: Get Multibinder (heals for 4 hearts), Longclaw (extends your needle), and Wreath of Purity (protects against maggot water) as early as you can.
Bonus 2 [mods]: Always Have Compass Effect + Always Have Magnet Effect. Reduces a lot of the early tedious grind.
Look, I’m all for a medium-to-high difficulty game that both challenges and rewards your skill as a player. That’s why I beat Absolute Radiance in the first game. Silksong, however, adds too much difficulty with too little reward. The skill floor is too high, the difficulty is inconsistent, and there's too much poorly designed padding in the form of i.e. uninspired gauntlets and cheap gotchas. With mods, the difficulty spikes become more well-rounded and reasonable. Lastly, I wish more reviewers could look at this game for what it is-- and not through the lens of 7 years of built-up hype and expectations. It's not a bad game, by any means. Silksong just lacks a reasonable level of difficulty and reward to make it enjoyable to play.
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